A Smuggler’s Story

On the morning of January 31, 2006, Oleg Vladimirovich Khintsagov, a slightly built, 49-year-old auto mechanic, got out of bed in the ramshackle house he shared with relatives in Nogir, a working-class-village-turned-suburb just a few miles inside Russia’s border with ex-Soviet Georgia. It was still early, the first light shimmering off the fresh snow atop the peaks of the nearby Caucasus Mountains.

For 15 years, Khintsagov had eked out a living, like so many Russians after the Soviet collapse, mostly as a small-time trader. Cheap Turkish chandeliers, dried fish, sausages—Khintsagov would peddle just about anything he could get his hands on, and the returns were usually meager. But now his luck looked about to change. In fact, if everything went according to plan, he would end the day very much richer. No truck would be needed to ferry today’s goods. The 100 grams of highly enriched uranium in his tattered leather coat was tucked into a plastic bag—the type a day laborer might use to wrap a sandwich.

Khintsagov headed out of Nogir toward the Russian-Georgian border in an old, white Niva four-wheel drive with three men from Georgia who had driven over to pick him up. One was Revaz Kurkumuli, a drug dealer. The other two had engaged in petty smuggling with Khint­sagov in the past—Henry Sud­jash­vili, who painted and peddled cheap reproductions of European masters, and Vazha Chikhashvili, a corrupt, low-ranking Georgian interior ministry official. Khint­sagov had bragged to his companions for months that what he had in his pocket was just a sample, and that he could get at least two kilograms of the grayish-green powder—not quite enough for a nuclear bomb, but, for a buyer with the right equipment and experience, a good start.

The men were traveling 100 miles to the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, to meet a Turk who had earlier told Khintsagov’s three Georgian associates that he represented a Muslim from a “serious organization” that was interested in getting HEU. There was, of course, the problem of the Russian-Georgian customs post, just a few miles from Nogir. But one of Khintsagov’s relatives worked there on the Russian side, and he saw to it that things went smoothly. When Khintsagov and his group approached Tbilisi, they veered off to the hardscrabble Mukhiani district on the outskirts and then arrived at a run-down, nine-story Soviet-style apartment block. There, in a squalid two-and-a-half-room apartment on the seventh floor, Khintsagov and Sud­jash­vili waited for their Turkish buyer.

Unfortunately for Khintsagov, however, the “buyer” was a Turkish-speaking operative of Georgia’s security service, which had gotten wind of his plans and set up a sting.

At first, the Georgian government didn’t believe that Khint­sagov’s uranium was weapons grade. “There are a lot of scammers saying they have nuclear materials,” Archil Pavlenishvili, Georgia’s chief nuclear investigator, told me in Tbilisi in January 2007. “In Khint­sagov’s case, we thought that, at most, he had some low-grade radioactive stuff, not highly enriched.” In fact, according to tests done by the U.S. government shortly after Khint­sagov’s arrest, his HEU was more than 89 percent pure, a level that the U.S. testing report described as “suitable for … military purposes including nuclear weapons.” Even more alarming was the apparent ease with which Khintsagov, a minor-league hustler, had acquired the material (most likely in the Siberian city of Novo­si­birsk, as he initially claimed to the Georgian authorities). Only by happenstance had the Georgians been able to apprehend Khintsagov, who had made several attempts to sell his HEU in Georgia’s lawless, breakaway territory of South Ossetia—one of several geopolitical black holes created in the region by the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.

In 1989, the Soviet economy was imploding. Khint­sa­gov, who had worked at a state-run auto-repair facility and as a tractor driver after he finished school in 1973, was lucky enough to land a job in Iraq, as one of several thousand Soviet citizens brought in by Saddam Hussein to help develop the country’s oil fields. But that stint ended in 1991, and Khintsagov headed home, where he had no prospect of a decent job. Much of the Soviet workforce was either unemployed or, more often, underemployed. Professors had become paupers. White-collar professionals were being turned into penniless paper pushers.

So Khintsagov became a spekulant—a speculator—still a pejorative in those early days after the fall of the U.S.S.R., where such activity had once been a crime. First he traded in fish, anything from the dried vobbly that working-class Russian men washed down with vodka, to the trout that thrive in the streams of the Caucasus and the much more expensive, and illicit, Caspian Sea beluga that pass through Khintsagov’s home region on the way to markets in Moscow. He dabbled in another Russian staple—kolbasa, or sausage. And at some point he began dealing in furs, a trade that took him from Nogir to Novosibirsk, the Siberian city famous for its academic research facilities, and infamous for the secret cities nearby that formed the heart of the Russian nuclear-weapons complex.

It’s unclear how or when Khintsagov began trading in nuclear materials. Pav­lenish­vili says that Khintsagov was apparently so afraid of his nuclear suppliers that after he was arrested, he refused to give even their first names. “He could have just invented some generic Russian names—Oleg, Dmitry. But he didn’t even do that,” said Pavlenishvili. “He was evidently terrified, possibly for his relatives, and possibly because when his jail sentence in Georgia is up, he knows he will be deported back to Russia.” Somehow, Khintsagov acquired the uranium, and once he did, he needed to find a buyer.

One natural hunting ground was South Ossetia, a tiny region of Georgia that borders Russia and is one of several unrecognized, Moscow-supported statelets left over from the Soviet collapse. A strip of land about the size of Long Island and home to no more than 50,000 people, the region is partly controlled by Russian-backed separatists, and partly by the Georgian authorities. It effectively split off from Georgia in 1992, after a year of ethnic blood­letting between Georgians and Ossetians that left about 1,000 people dead and at least another 10,000 homeless.

Today, any pretense South Ossetia had to independence has been abandoned. The Russian flag flies alongside the South Ossetian yellow, white, and red tricolor over the separatist government headquarters, a drab, early- Khrushchev-looking affair in the run-down capital of Tskhinvali. The tree-lined main avenue is still called “Stalin Street” (an ethnic Georgian, Stalin was said to have also had Ossetian roots). Most of the government’s top leaders are Russians with no ties to the region. Russia keeps 1,000 peacekeepers there (500 ethnic Russians and 500 North Ossetians) as part of a 16-year-old agreement; it has handed out passports to the local population and says it will defend the territory if Georgia acts to reassert control.

Faced at independence with economic collapse, Georgia’s corrupt central government had essentially ignored South Ossetia, which became what its inhabitants joked was “the world’s biggest duty-free shop.” Near the administrative border with Georgia, traders even set up an enormous open-air market where people from all over the region came to buy everything from Russian gasoline to pasta, all free of the import duties that they would pay in other parts of Georgia. (In 2004, shortly after President Mikheil Saakashvili came to power in Georgia, his government shut down the market by placing a police and customs post nearby.) South Ossetia also became especially popular with car thieves—Ossetian, Georgian, and Russian alike—who ripped off automobiles in Georgia, drove them the short distance to South Ossetia, and sold them to middlemen who then ferried them to Russia. And the U.S. government says counterfeit $100 bills traceable to South Ossetia have surfaced in at least four American cities.

According to Georgian authorities, Khintsagov first tried to find a buyer for his uranium in South Ossetia, which he visited at least five times during 2005. Meanwhile, he was also working with his old smuggling buddies back in Georgia, who had “business partners” in South Ossetia, according to Pavlenishvili. At least one of Khintsagov’s associates had been under Georgian government surveillance for drug dealing. That’s how the Georgian authorities first heard about the nuclear material. They decided to set their trap using a Turkish-speaking Georgian agent, who approached Khint­sagov’s Georgian associates with an offer of $1 million for a “test shipment” of 100 grams of bomb-grade uranium—more money than Khintsagov could ever have hoped to get in South Ossetia. By having Khintsagov bring the HEU into Georgia, Interior Minister Ivane Merabishvili told me, the Tbilisi government could also ensure that the materials did not disappear into the “black hole” of South Ossetia.

uranium
RUSSIAN TAKEOUT: The U.S. anaylsis of Khintsagov's seized material called it "suitable for... nuclear weapons."


I first heard of Khintsagov’s arrest for smuggling HEU on March 15, 2006. I had just interviewed President Saakashvili, the brash, 40-year-old leader of Georgia’s “Rose Revolution,” in 2003, which had ousted the corrupt government of Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister and longtime Georgian chieftain. Saakashvili had been complaining to me (in flawless English polished at Columbia University) about commercial smuggling through South Ossetia, hinting about the region’s use as a conduit for more-nefarious purposes. After I stepped out of his office, one of his top advisers mentioned that a Russian national had recently been caught trying to smuggle into Georgia a significant amount of HEU, which he had earlier tried to sell in South Ossetia. When I asked for more information, I was told that it was too early to discuss details: the Georgians were trying to get the smuggler to cooperate and lead investigators to the supplier of his bomb-grade uranium. (Citing the same reasons, U.S. officials in Tbilisi had also asked that the case be kept quiet.) Over the next 10 months, I constantly prodded the Georgians to give me the details of the story.

What prompted their eventual acquiescence was probably a combination of factors: frustration over Russia’s lack of cooperation; the impending release of an incident report by the International Atomic Energy Agency; and weariness with U.S. pressure to keep a lid on an incident that Tbilisi saw as compelling evidence of the international threat posed by South Ossetia’s lawlessness.

At last, on January 13, 2007, I met with Interior Minister Merabishvili. We were supposed to talk about Georgia’s efforts to reform its once-hopelessly-corrupt police force. But the night before, I had prevailed on my government interlocutor to ask again for information about the HEU smuggling case. My contact had sighed and placed a call to Saakashvili’s cell phone. “Can we talk about the HEU smuggling case yet?” he asked him. “I’m taking Lawrence Sheets over to Vano [the interior minister] tomorrow to talk about police reforms.”

“Yes, go ahead,” I heard Saakashvili reply.

The next day, when I arrived to meet with Interior Minister Merabishvili, my contact walked up to him and in a low tone passed on the president’s message giving Merabishvili permission to discuss the HEU case.

Merabishvili, a friendly, compact man, nodded. I sat down in front of his huge desk, bare except for an impressive bank of phones, a big-screen plasma monitor, and two cartons of Kent cigarettes. After a few minutes of questions about police reforms (he spent some time using the plasma screen to show off the views from the 400 security cameras now installed across Tbilisi), we turned to the subject of nuclear smuggling via Georgia and its breakaway territories.

Merabishvili explained the basics of the case: how the authorities had caught Khintsagov, and how they believed his capture had been only the second interdiction of a serious international HEU smuggling attempt—both through Georgia—since the 9/11 terror attacks. Then he picked up one of the telephones and started making calls.

Within a few minutes, aides began walking in and placing photos, diagrams, and documents in front of Merabishvili. One was a photograph of Khintsagov. Another was a picture of the HEU wrapped in plastic. There were summary documents detailing the 2006 HEU case and a similar one in 2003; there was a Georgian translation of documents from U.S. nuclear laboratories with the test results on the confiscated nuclear materials. Merabishvili complained that the Russians had claimed they could not identify the source of the bomb-grade nuclear material. He then picked up the phone and called Pavlenishvili, his chief nuclear investigator, ordering him to brief me.

I met Pavlenishvili in the lobby of the luxurious Tbi­lisi Marriott hotel. A short, earnest man in a grey overcoat who spoke as plainly as he dressed, he corroborated what I had been told by the interior minister about Khintsagov—the details of his case, his Georgian cohorts, his attempts to sell his HEU in South Ossetia. Early on in the investigation, Pavlenishvili says, the Georgian government informed the Russian Embassy in Georgia of Khintsagov’s arrest, offering routine consular access. He said the Russians did not respond. The Georgian general prosecutor also sent a letter to his Russian counterpart, asking the Russians to check Khintsagov’s house in Nogir for HEU. The Georgian nuclear investigators knew of no response from the Russians. However, about a month after Khintsagov’s arrest, the Russian security service—the FSB, successor to the Soviet KGB—did send two operatives from Moscow to Tbilisi to collect samples of the material for analysis.

The FSB later sent their Georgian counterparts a brief report on the results. On page five of the letter, which I ultimately obtained from other sources in the Georgian government, the Russians confirmed that Khintsagov’s cache was indeed HEU. The FSB put the level of enrichment at 89.38 percent, just below the initial American assessment. Yet the letter went on to say that because the material had been produced more than 10 years ago, its origins were impossible to determine.

Every nuclear physicist I contacted—from Calgary to Monterey to Moscow—cast doubt on that claim. The first was Boris Zhukov, director of a facility with a typically Soviet name: the Laboratory of the Isotopic Complex of Experimental Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Zhukov is known as a straight shooter, someone unafraid to speak to what remains of the independent Russian press on the poisoning, in London, of former Russian KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko. But over the phone, Zhukov sounded skittish, saying that he didn’t want to discuss anything military or anything secret. I told Zhukov that I wanted to ask him a simple question: Was it possible, as this FSB letter indicated, that the Russian government would be unable to identify the source of the HEU that Khintsagov had been caught with? “In general terms, of course, everything can be traced. Every batch of highly enriched uranium that is produced is given a ‘passport,’ and it’s very carefully entered into log books,” Zhukov replied. “Of course, if they want to, they can identify where it came from.” Zhukov then hung up.

I later spoke with David Morrissey, a chemistry professor at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at Michigan State University, the world’s premier facility for producing radioactive isotopes for research. Morrissey called the Russian claim implausible. “Highly enriched uranium has unique characteristics,” he said. “It’s like when the police take a fingerprint. No two fingerprints are the same.” As for the Russian claim that the material’s age—judged by its radioactive decay—could have obscured its origins, Morrissey dismissed this as well, noting that correcting for radioactive decay was a relatively simple procedure. The U.S. analyses of Khintsagov’s HEU reportedly showed the presence of two telltale trace isotopes (U-234 and U-236) strongly suggesting that the material came from Russia.

On January 26, 2007, the day after William J. Broad and I broke the news of the smuggling attempt in The New York Times, an official in Russia’s federal atomic energy agency accused the Georgians of not providing enough HEU for analysis. Yet nowhere in the FSB’s letter, nor in another document I acquired in which the Russian agents acknowledge collecting a sample of the HEU, do the Russians say anything about having too little material.

I sent Pavel Felgenhauer, one of Russia’s foremost independent military and security analysts, a copy of the FSB’s letter to the Georgians. Felgenhauer referred to it as an otpiska—a meaningless, vacuous response. Felgen­hauer has always maintained that Russian nuclear stockpiles are far less secure than the world would like to think. He also speculates that rogue elements in the Russian military and security services could be involved in the trade of radioactive materials, citing the documented sales of mines, mortars, guns, and rocket launchers by Russian military officers to Chechen separatists—weapons the separatists then used to kill Russian troops.

But William Potter, the director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, says the clumsy FSB document claiming that the HEU’s origins could not be identified more likely reflects something else: “The Russians are in a general state of denial about the loss of nuclear materials. It is absolutely perplexing.” Potter says Russian nuclear physicists still refuse even to contemplate that terrorists could get their hands on enough HEU to build an atom bomb. “They maintain that it is beyond the capability of a non-state actor … to make a fissionable device,” Potter says.

Whether Khintsagov had the two kilos he claimed to have, or had access to more, remains unknown; the Russian government has never said whether it even investigated Khintsagov’s claims. (My numerous phone calls and e-mails to the FSB and the Russian Interior Ministry have also gone unanswered.) Although a national nuclear program might need only 10 or 15 kilograms of HEU to make a nuclear bomb, terrorists working more crudely would likely require at least 40 kilos. Has enough material leaked out of Russia since the Soviet collapse to enable terrorists to make a bomb? “We simply don’t know the answer,” says Potter, “because nobody knows how much stuff existed in the first place. It’s like with drug trafficking: it’s just impossible to determine what the real interdiction rate is. It’s sometimes said that the interdiction rate for narcotics is less than 10 percent. One can imagine that for nuclear trafficking, it’s bound to be far less.”

Two other recent Georgian interdictions, many of their details not public until now, suggest that the trade in Russian nuclear materials is more than a trickle.

About 1:30 a.m. on June 26, 2003, Georgian border guards near the town of Sadakhlo—a muddy village near where Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia meet—apprehended an Armenian named Garik Dadayan as he tried to cross into Armenia with about 200 grams of U-235 bomb-grade uranium. Sadakhlo has a reputation as a smuggler’s paradise: Armenian and Azeri traders meet there and do business in everything from Armenian brandy, Azeri tea, Caspian Sea caviar, and Turkish CDs to cheap tool kits and jeans. It’s one of the few informal contact points between Azerbaijan and Armenia, two nations that have been warring over territory for most of the past 20 years.

Dadayan fits much the same profile as Khintsagov. Born in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, he has only a basic education, according to Armenian court records that I obtained, and no known full-time profession. He reportedly suffers from psychological and physical disabilities that he incurred fighting in Armenia’s war with Azerbaijan.

Like Khintsagov, Dadayan made only feeble efforts to conceal his stash of HEU, hiding it in a cellophane bag tucked inside a metal tea box. But several specialists I spoke to speculated that because his HEU, according to U.S. analyses, also contained the chemical compounds UO2 and U3O8 (which emit more radiation than U-235), it set off the radiation detectors the Georgians had at the border. The guards say that when the sensors sounded, Dadayan tossed the satchel containing the tea box filled with bomb-grade uranium onto the ground. He said he’d never seen the substance in the box before and that the cellophane bag had only been for food scraps. So sloppy were his smuggling efforts that, according to Armenian court records, his notebook contained scribblings mentioning “U308” and the amount of money—believed by Georgian officials to be $15,000—that he was to receive for acting as a nuclear mule. Dadayan was handed over to the Armenian government, tried, and sentenced in 2004 to two and a half years in prison.

The Armenians and Georgians say Dadayan got his bomb-grade uranium from contacts in Siberia. Even the Russian FSB, in 2003 more inclined than now to cooperate, confirmed to the Georgians that before his arrest Dadayan had traveled twice by rail from Moscow, where he had been living, to Novosibirsk. “In the early stages, yes, they were cooperative,” Pavlenishvili told me. “Then suddenly, cooperation stopped. We don’t know why. We thought they discovered from which lab or factory [the HEU] was from, and they maybe arrested the supporters of Dadayan, and after that, they lost any interest in this case.”

A Georgian government document summarizing the incident suggested a complex web of contacts. Da- dayan’s role appeared to be only that of a courier. The deal to smuggle the bomb-grade uranium, according to the Georgians, reportedly involved a corrupt Russian military officer, elements of the Georgian and Armenian criminal underworlds, and an Armenian contact of Kurdish descent working in Russia.

Finally—or, more likely, not finally—there is the case of Tamaz Dimitradze, another Willie Loman–esque figure, this one from Georgia, who was apprehended on August 4, 2006, with four glass vials containing a kilogram of un­enriched uranium “yellowcake.” According to Pavle­nishvili, who told me of this previously unreported case when we met in Tbilisi, the Georgians had put Dimitradze under surveillance. “We had information from our sources in the Georgian criminal underworld that Dimitradze was expecting a shipment of radioactive materials. We didn’t know anything about what type,” Pavlenishvili said. Dimitradze crossed a bridge from Georgia proper into Abkhazia, another breakaway Georgian territory under Russian protection, and met with two Russian associates who had traveled there from the nearby Russian Black Sea resort town of Sochi.

A spectacularly beautiful region whose palm-tree-lined beaches once served as a prime Soviet movie location, Abkhazia was also the site of one of the U.S.S.R.’s top-secret nuclear-research facilities. (According to Shevardnadze, even he, the leader of the Georgian Communist Party, needed special permission from Moscow to visit the complex.) Several reports note that up to two kilograms of HEU may have gone missing from the Abkhaz facility after the capital city, Sukhumi, fell to separatist forces in 1993.

Dimitradze was arrested after crossing back into Georgia and arriving in the Black Sea port city of Batumi. According to Pavlenishvili, Dimitradze said he took possession of the yellowcake from the two Russians. During the investigation, Dimitradze claimed he knew nothing more about the two men or the source of the unenriched uranium.

Citing Dimitradze’s repeated business failures and his careless, cavalier behavior, Pavlenishvili described him, like Oleg Khintsagov and Garik Dadayan, as a complete amateur. “He probably did not know exactly what kind of stuff he even had,” Pavlenishvili said. “He just dreamed of getting some nuclear materials and becoming rich man.” After a trial closed to the public for security reasons, Dimitradze was sentenced to seven years in prison. His sentence was reduced to five years on appeal, but the government—citing mandatory sentencing laws—has appealed to have the original seven-year term restored.

Dimitradze had vague ideas, according to the Georgians, of either selling the uranium to Turkish middlemen in Georgia or smuggling it into Turkey in search of a buyer. “It is a well-known rumor in the Georgian criminal world that you can sell anything in Turkey,” Pavle­nish­vili said. He said that there had long been reports in such circles about a Turkish man with the nickname Ekimi—“the Doctor” in Georgian—interested in obtaining nuclear material. The Georgians say they know nothing more about who “the Doctor” might be.

The Georgians, of course, have good reason to publicize these three cases. Two of them highlight the dangers posed by the loose frontiers and unaccountable “governments” of disputed territories effectively under Russian control. And all three are strong arguments for the United States to continue providing Georgia with millions of dollars in assistance to strengthen its customs and intelligence services. But even with those rationales in mind, Georgian authorities could have been far more aggressive in seeking to embarrass the Russians. They deliberately passed up an opportunity to apprehend Khintsagov at the “border” with South Ossetia, for example, which would have been a far more effective dramatization of the threat posed by that region’s rampant smuggling. They waited 11 months to publicize Khintsagov’s arrest. And this article marks the first media disclosure of the details of Tamaz Dimitradze’s case.

Set aside the motives of the Georgians, and you still have the facts of the cases themselves. All three happened within the past five years, well after more-stringent controls on nuclear materials should have been in place. Two involved significant amounts of highly enriched uranium that, according to the Russian analysis sent to the Georgians, seem to have come from two separate sources. And all three plots were carried out by poorly educated amateurs who knew little about the nuclear materials they were trafficking and wanted only to make a quick buck. All three men made foolhardy mistakes—in some cases transporting their atom-bomb materials through functioning border points, and in others widely advertising their efforts to obtain and sell nuclear materials.

What we know we don’t know about the state of Russian nuclear material is frightening enough. But what if these three would-be traffickers had been not bumblers but professionals—interested not in money but in ideology, focused on accumulating enough bomb-grade material to assemble a nuclear weapon that could kill millions of people? What if they had avoided border posts altogether and detoured through unmonitored mountain passes, or had chosen to cross the thousands of miles of porous, underpoliced borders Russia shares with countries like Kazakhstan?

Unfortunately, if the stories of Oleg Khintsagov, Garik Dadayan, and Tamaz Dimitradze suggest anything, it is that the answers to such questions may soon no longer be hypothetical.

Ethiopia war gets little attention

Hundreds have died as ethnic Somali rebels fight for autonomy for the Ogaden region. Government troops are accused of indiscriminate killings.

By Edmund Sanders
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 23, 2008

NAIROBI, KENYA — The teenager awoke under a pile of corpses to a pricking sensation on her face. Ants were biting her eyelids and the inside of her mouth.

The pain, however, brought relief to the 17-year-old.

"I thought, 'I'm alive,' " Ridwan Hassan Sahid remembers. She felt blood oozing from rope burns around her neck and the weight of a body against her back. But fearing that the Ethiopian soldiers who had left her for dead in a roadside ditch would return, she quickly brushed away the ants and shut her eyes, then slipped back into unconsciousness.

The brutal assault and her miraculous escape mark one of the most chilling stories to emerge from an unfolding tragedy in eastern Ethiopia that has largely escaped the attention of a world transfixed by the humanitarian crisis in neighboring Sudan's Darfur region.

Ever since exiting colonialists arbitrarily stuck a triangle-shaped wedge of land with 4 million ethnic Somalis inside Ethiopia's border, violence and suffering have plagued the region. Now, many of them have been caught up in a war between the Ethiopian government and a separatist group known as the Ogaden National Liberation Front.

Hundreds of civilians have been killed and tens of thousands were displaced in the last year alone, though exact figures are unknown because the area is remote and Ethiopian officials restrict access for humanitarian groups and journalists.

Survivors such as Sahid offer the only glimpse of the tragedy. The petite young woman, who lives at a secret location, shared her story recently with The Times.

Now 18, Sahid at times seems to be an average teen, picking absent-mindedly at her henna-stained fingernails and blushing when strangers express interest in her.

But behind her soft brown eyes is a weariness that belies her age, and a necklace of scar tissue rings her throat where the rope cut into her skin.

She recounts her ordeal without emotion. Only occasionally does her veneer crack long enough for a tear to roll down her check, which she self-consciously laughs off and wipes away.

"I wonder sometimes," she says, "what kind of life I can have now."

She grew up in the village of Qorile with eight siblings. The family, like most everyone else in the area, were semi-nomadic cattle and sheep herders.

Ever since she can remember, Ethiopian authorities have been seen as the enemy.

"We feel as if we are living under occupation," she says. "We grew up afraid of them."

The Ogaden conflict dates to the 1940s, when, after World War II, European nations lost or began to relinquish their colonies in the Horn of Africa.

After some years under British administration, Ogaden and surrounding areas were placed under Ethiopian control, but the decision was never accepted by the ethnic Somalis living there, spurring two wars between Ethiopia and Somalia and spawning a string of rebel movements seeking autonomy or unification with Somalia.

Ethiopian officials accuse the Ogaden rebels of using terrorist tactics, including bombs, land mines and harassing the civilians it claims to represent. In April 2007, the rebels killed more than 70 people at a Chinese-run exploration facility in the region.

The attack prompted what aid groups and witnesses call a heavy-handed response by the Ethiopian government. Troops are accused of burning down villages believed to be rebel havens, raping women, forcibly recruiting young men into government militias and imposing a commercial blockade that sent food prices and malnutrition rates soaring.

"They used mass indiscriminate measures to collectively punish the entire population," Human Rights Watch researcher Leslie Lefkow said.

Ethiopian officials deny any widespread human rights abuses and blame rebels for the violence. "They are working with internationally known terrorists," said Zemedkun Tekle, spokesman for Ethiopia's Information Ministry.

Sahid says her family always tried to stay out of the fray: "We are not political people."

But she found herself caught in the middle in July, when several hundred Ethiopian troops surrounded her village. Her father was away tending animals in the fields and her mother was shopping in a nearby town. Sahid was washing her face when soldiers kicked in the door that morning.

"You are guerrillas," they shouted as they ransacked the house, stealing food and supplies, Sahid remembers. She escaped through a back door and huddled with other frightened villagers. Soon soldiers gathered them all at a well and read names from a list of "spies" and rebel sympathizers.

"Nobody knew who would be selected, but you knew if your name was called, you would be killed," says Fathi Abdulla, 22, a cousin of Sahid who lives in the same village. Sahid froze when she heard her name called. She and 10 others were taken to the school, which became a makeshift prison for interrogation and torture.

"They took us one by one," Sahid says.

Soldiers accused her of taking supplies to rebels. They tied her hands and legs together behind her back.

"They kicked me and stepped on my back," she says. "I told them that in my whole life, the only person I've ever helped was my mother."

The next morning, Sahid and the other prisoners were marched for hours to another village.

"They beat us like animals when we couldn't keep up," she says. "Mentally, I was already dead. I was just waiting to die."

Arriving at the village, Sahid says, she watched as soldiers looted the town and burned down all the huts. That night, none of the prisoners slept, fearing what the next day would bring.

At daybreak, without explanation, soldiers began executing them, Sahid says. Two villagers were hanged from trees. Two others were choked with metal rods and rope.

Sahid was the last attacked. She remembers hearing the others scream and beg for mercy, but couldn't move or make a sound herself.

"At that point, I was like a tree. I had no feeling. I was like a statue."

Two soldiers ordered her into the ditch, but she refused. Finally one pounced, choking Sahid with a metal rod used to clean guns. They struggled for a minute, but she did not lose consciousness and the soldier gave up.

Next, two exasperated soldiers grabbed the girl and tied a rope around her neck. They pulled in different directions until she collapsed into the ditch.

The next thing Sahid recalls are the ants. The midday sun was beating down and she felt disoriented. Blood flowed from her nose and neck. Her legs were trapped under a man's naked body. She says she closed her eyes again, uncertain whether she would live or die.

Back in her village, friends and family formed a search party, following the soldiers' footprints. They expected to recover nothing more than bodies.

After several hours of walking, they encountered a group of nomads who told them about a nearby field with some bodies. Remarkably, they said, a young girl was still alive.

"We rushed to the place," Abdulla says. The scene was grisly. Two men hung from nooses in a tree. Other victims lay naked, with belts and ropes still around their necks.

Sahid was in the ditch, under two bodies.

"As we came closer, she opened her eyes and looked at us! We were so shocked."

They moved her under a tree, but feared she would soon die. They buried the bodies and awaited help. Eventually camels were brought and friends began a weeks-long journey to secretly move Sahid out of the country.

She remembers little of the escape or her recovery. She still can't use her right hand because of nerve damage from the beatings.

With an uncertain future, Sahid spends most days indoors. Venturing outside sometimes brings panic attacks.

She says the quiet moments are the hardest to bear.

"Whenever I sit for even a minute, I draw my mind back to those events. And I start to cry."

edmund.sanders@latimes.com

Colombia's Rebels Face Possibility of Implosion

Chief Threat Not Deaths, but Desertion

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 22, 2008; A01

PEREIRA, Colombia -- Hungry, desperate and afraid for his life, Pedro Pablo Montoya shot the commander he was supposed to protect. He then severed the commander's right hand -- as proof he'd killed one of Colombia's most wanted men -- and deserted the once-powerful rebel group to which he had pledged allegiance.

The slaying this month of Manuel Jesús Muñoz, a member of the ruling directorate of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, was a dramatic signal that a rebel group known for its resilience is engulfed in an internal crisis that could lead to its implosion after four decades of armed struggle.

In a country where most people cannot remember a time of peace, Colombians are for the first time raising the possibility that a guerrilla group once thought invincible could be forced into peace negotiations or even defeated militarily.

Weakened by infiltrators and facing constant combat and aerial bombardment, the insurgency is losing members in record numbers. The FARC, as the group is known, lost 1,583 fighters in combat last year, its columns are plagued by command-and-control problems, and popular support is evaporating, the government of President Álvaro Uribe says.

Since 2000, the Uribe administration has received $5 billion in U.S. aid, mostly for military and anti-drug programs -- more than any other government outside the Middle East. The money has helped it revamp the Colombian army, paying for new helicopters and training for elite troops, although rights groups remain concerned about abuses, including the killings of civilians.

The most serious problem the FARC is facing is not guerrilla deaths or the loss of territory, but mass desertion, according to political analysts, military officials and former guerrillas interviewed this month. Many said desertions have badly hurt morale and provided the military with important strategic information about the hermetic group.

"If the situation continues like this, the FARC will be finished," said Ivan, 33, who deserted from the group Dec. 27 after serving as the No. 2 commander of a unit in the coffee-growing west.

"It won't be tomorrow, and it could take years, but it will happen," said Ivan, who asked that his last name not be used out of fear the FARC might kill him.

Montoya, 33, said the threat comes from men like him who have lost their devotion to the FARC. In an interview at a military base here, he spoke of how he had once dreamed of taking power and spent 16 years becoming an experienced warrior. But then, he said, he began to fear being killed by the Colombian troops chasing his rebel unit or even in one of the purges his commander had been ordering.

"The internal situation is this: Finances, bad; medicines, bad; supplies, bad," Montoya said.

"The civilian population does not want to collaborate," he added. "There is a complete rejection. Even civilians are telling guerrillas: "Desert. Don't let yourself get killed."

Last year, 2,480 rebels abandoned the FARC, up from 1,558 the previous year, according to the Defense Ministry. Most are classified as "men in arms," fighters on the front lines of a simmering conflict. About 40 percent are plainclothes militiamen who carry out intelligence operations and supply provisions to FARC units.

In interviews in government-run safe houses, deserters from eight different "fronts," as FARC units are called, talked of a rebel organization unable to supply itself adequately or coordinate among far-flung fighters. The former rebels recounted the sheer terror of being bombed by Colombian fighter planes and the constant firefights with troops.

They also described the hardship of being in units that have lost half or more of their fighters in the past five years, some to combat but most to desertions. Montoya estimates that his old unit was down to about 60 fighters, far from the 250 it had in 2002.

"It's massive, from commanders to low-level guerrillas," Montoya said of the desertions. "People are tired."

The deserters also say that increasingly paranoid commanders have started to stage more "war councils," jungle trials in which guerrillas face execution if found guilty of treachery.

Montoya said that Muñoz, his column harried by army troops and lacking food and ammunition, had held several war councils. The commander's computer, which Montoya turned over to the army, contained proof of dozens of trials.

"Anything you do that generates a lack of confidence, they call a war council," said Rocio, 28, who deserted Dec. 14 from the 40th Front in the plains state of Meta. "They prefer to liquidate than to have you run away."

The assessment comes not just from soldiers and deserters, but also from leftist opponents of the Uribe administration.

"What the guerrillas need to understand is that today, in the 21st century, after so many things have happened in the world, the armed revolutionary struggle is not an option," said Carlos Lozano, editor of the communist weekly Voz and a member of the Communist Party, which has historical ties to the FARC. Lozano and other analysts, including some government officials, say the FARC does not face defeat anytime soon. The rebels remain entrenched in the country's vast southeastern plains and jungles and are increasingly active along its poorly patrolled borders. The group is also believed to continue to draw a steady tax from the cocaine trade.

"The FARC has suffered a lot, but they are still very powerful," said Rafael Pardo, a former senator, defense minister and author of books on Colombia's conflict. He noted that the FARC, while losing members to combat and desertions, has an "immense capacity to recruit" young, poor farmers with few other options.

But the FARC has slowly contracted from its zenith in 2002. The Defense Ministry said the group is estimated to have fewer than 11,000 fighters, down from 16,900 in 2002.

In the past few months, the armed forces have killed seasoned mid-level commanders such as Gustavo Rueda, who led a once-feared unit in the strategically located Maria Mountains of northern Colombia, and Tomás Medina Caracas, who ran the all-important 16th Front in the southeast, raising funds from the cocaine trade.

"It was huge when he died," said Angeli, 23, who joined the FARC in 2002 and deserted last year from Medina's unit. "He was the commander most able to motivate the young ones. The desertions began right after he was killed."

On March 1, Luis Edgar Devia, better known as Raúl Reyes, died when Colombian air force fighters bombed his camp just inside Ecuador. He became the first member of the FARC's seven-member secretariat to be killed. A week later, Montoya shot Muñoz.

Military officials and deserters say information gleaned from deserters helped the army in several successful operations against top commanders. "Desertion is much more useful, because you get information from a deserter," said Vice Defense Minister Sergio Jaramillo. "You hit the morale of the FARC much more than you do with a death in combat."

Deserting guerrillas are motivated by a range of factors, from the sense that theirs is a lost cause to the lure of government programs, advertised on national television and regional radio stations, that provide shelter, food and a stipend to deserters.

Although those accused of atrocities face trials, rank-and-file rebels are pardoned for the crime of "rebellion." In the case of Muñoz, the government says Montoya and other guerrillas who provided intelligence about the commander will share a reward of about $2.5 million.

Johana, who joined the rebels in 2003 when she was 13 and had a baby with a commander, described her three years in the FARC as being "dead." She was wounded twice and watched as droves of her comrades deserted, including her father and brother.

Since deserting from the 32nd Front in war-torn Putumayo state on Dec. 16, 2006, she has focused on her family.

"I want to be someone in life," said Johana, who is now 18. "I got this opportunity, and made it out of the guerrillas alive."

In Iraq, U.S. seeks jobs for surplus hired guns

As calm returns to some areas, the U.S. military is faced with the question of what to do with the tribesmen it hired to defend their neighborhoods.

By Alexandra Zavis
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 21, 2008

HAWR RAJAB, IRAQ — A man in a dusty track suit elbowed his way through the crowd that had formed as soon as U.S. soldiers pulled up in this war-damaged village on Baghdad's southern outskirts.

The man, who gave his name as Nasir, told the soldiers that he used to earn a living as a wedding singer. But the masked gunmen who took over Hawr Rajab in the name of their austere version of Islam considered such work sacrilegious and burned down his house.

When the Sunni Arab villagers decided to fight back with the help of U.S. forces, Nasir said, he was one of the first to sign up for the $10-a-day paramilitary work. So he was less than pleased when he was informed last month that security had increased to the point that his services as a gun-for-hire were no longer needed.

"I don't want to make trouble," he told the soldiers urgently. "I just want to live my life, and I need work."

After five years of trial and error, the strategy of recruiting tribesmen to help defend their neighborhoods against Islamic extremists has proved one of the most effective weapons in the U.S. counterinsurgency arsenal.

But restoring a measure of calm to what were some of the most violent places in Iraq has in turn presented the U.S. military with one of its biggest headaches: what to do with the more than 80,000 armed men whose loyalty has been bought with a paycheck that cannot go on forever.

"We don't want to pay people to stand on street corners with guns if they don't need to be there. What we want to do is we want to get them into a transition to more gainful employment," said Army Col. Martin Stanton, who oversees the effort.

After months of U.S. entreaties, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's Shiite-led government grudgingly agreed in December to hire a portion of the mostly Sunni Arab fighters for the official security forces. But the process of vetting and approving the job candidates is painfully slow -- some say deliberately so -- and less than a third of them are expected to qualify.

U.S. and Iraqi officials are now hammering out details of a plan to revive local economies and create new opportunities for the fighters through vocational training, public works schemes, farm revitalization programs, micro-grants and business start-up loans. The two governments have committed $155 million apiece to the projects.

But these are long-term strategies, and the fighters need jobs now. If not, many openly declare they will have no choice but to work for the insurgency, which has tried to lure some of them back with offers of more money.

Already, cracks are appearing in what one senior official describes as the central plank of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy. Hundreds of Sunni guards abandoned their posts for weeks last month in the Diyala provincial capital, Baqubah, demanding the replacement of a provincial police chief, a Shiite Muslim they accused of brutality against Sunnis. Errant U.S. airstrikes, which have killed a number of the fighters, prompted a similar walkout in Jurf al Sakhar, south of Baghdad.

Sunni Arab tribesmen first approached the U.S. military in Anbar province in 2006 for help in driving out the Islamic extremists they once backed.

When commanders saw how effective the tribesmen were, they began using the power of the dollar to court allies in other insurgent bastions where residents had grown disenchanted with the militants' ideology and brutality. The U.S. military has signed contracts worth $143 million with the tribesmen, which it now calls Sons of Iraq, to help guard roads, bridges and other key infrastructure.

A stopgap

U.S. commanders say the three-month deals were never intended to be more than stopgap measures in areas where U.S. and Iraqi forces did not have the numbers to provide security. But the fighters argue that they have proved their worth and deserve permanent jobs.

Adding urgency to their demands is a mounting death toll among the guards, as Sunni insurgents take aim at the neighborhood security groups that threaten their networks. Shiite militiamen also have attacked the guards in some areas. But though the Iraqi government will make so-called martyr payments to the families of slain Iraqi soldiers and police officers, there is no such provision for the guards.

A senior guard leader in Baqubah estimated that as many as 450 members, mostly Sunnis, had been killed in Diyala province alone, a key battleground in the fight against the Sunni militant group Al Qaeda in Iraq and its affiliates.

"These people have sacrificed for Diyala," said the leader, who goes by the nickname Abu Talib. "They shouldn't just be dropped."

The village of Hawr Rajab in Diyala in many ways epitomizes the work of the guard program. Four months ago, U.S. soldiers found headless bodies in the largely deserted streets. Now, many residents who had fled in fear are back, and the village bustles with activity.

American soldiers are handing out micro-grants to help businessmen repair their stores and buy stock. Seed and plastic have been distributed to farmers. An Iraqi contractor is revamping the clinic and building classrooms. And there are plans to convert the abandoned shoe factory into an ice-making plant by the summer.

"Men with weapons can only provide so much security," said Lt. Col. Mark Solomon, who commands the U.S. cavalry squadron responsible for the area. "The rest has to come from governance and economic growth."

Security has improved to such a degree that Solomon decided to shift 200 of the 500 villagers employed as security guards to a pilot public works crew, to provide much-needed services.

Nasir, the unemployed wedding singer, readily agreed to join the new program. But it has not been easy to persuade the proud tribesmen to trade in their AK-47s for trash bags and brooms. Some were wealthy landowners under Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led regime. Many hold university degrees.

"I graduated from the teaching college. I don't want to sweep the streets," said Daoud Salman, a tall man in traditional Arab robes.

Salman, a father of four, said his former comrades-in-arms laugh at him when they see him picking up trash and burning reeds to clear canals supplying water to farms.

He isn't the only one disgruntled with the job switch. On a recent drive through the village, most of the workers energetically sweeping the streets with palm fronds were younger than 15, many of them the children of men killed in recent fighting.

"The older ones don't work," said Adil Abbas Khodier, who is in charge of the program. "They all want to be sheiks."

This month, U.S. Air Force technicians began teaching a class of 50 from the public works crew how to become builders, masons, electricians and plumbers, skills they can put to work repairing the village's nearly 100 damaged homes. Once they qualify, their salaries will go up to about $15 a day, while those for the guards will drop to about $8.

But despite the pay incentive, most of the fighters tell their tribal leaders that they would prefer to remain on the checkpoints or to join the police, the only reliable source of local employment.

About 10,000 guard members have been absorbed into the police force in overwhelmingly Sunni Anbar, where there was a virtual security vacuum until the tribesmen rebelled against the Al Qaeda in Iraq extremists in their midst. But authorities in Baghdad and other religiously mixed parts of the country have been more resistant to the idea of bringing Sunni guards into the largely Shiite police force. So far, they have accepted fewer than 8,000 applicants.

The country's Shiite leaders are suspicious of the Sunni fighters, who include many former insurgents, and want them carefully vetted before allowing them into the official security forces.

There is a limit to how many can join the local police force. The army, on the other hand, has space, but most of the fighters aren't interested in a military career because they want to stay close to their families.

Hawr Rajab's leaders have been pressing authorities in Baghdad for a police station and have collected 700 applications. But with a population of less than 10,000, the village does not qualify to have its own station, a district official informed them last month.

'Government is too slow'

If villagers want to become police officers, the envoy in a crisp suit and polished shoes told a smoke-filled room, they will have to work in neighboring Abu Dasheer, a mostly Shiite village that is a stronghold of the feared Mahdi Army militia. Fighters from the two villages have clashed for years, and occasional shots are still fired between them.

A stunned silence fell over the room.

Ali Majeed Msir was one of two tribal sheiks who launched the guard program in Hawr Rajab. Because of his family's stand, he says, insurgents killed his father, stole the family's money and slaughtered its cattle.

He now chairs a council set up to run the village since the insurgents fled, an unpaid group that is campaigning for recognition from higher levels of government.

"This project is successful right now . . . but the government is too slow," Msir said glumly, pulling a pair of dark sunglasses over his eyes.

If the government won't take care of his men, he said, they might have no choice but to return to the battlefield.

"We want to be part of the government," he said. "But if the government keeps refusing, we will have to be a militia."

alexandra.zavis@latimes.com

As Tensions Rise in Lebanon, Residents Again Fear the Worst

By Alia Ibrahim, Robin Wright and Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 21, 2008; A14

BEIRUT -- Posters slapped up on the walls of Beirut's Shiite Muslim southern suburbs show the face of a slain Hezbollah leader and declare that his death is a "sign of the coming victory."

Just out of sight from Beirut's shores, U.S. warships ply the waters. Their presence, the Bush administration says, is the United States' own warning, directed at Syria, Iran and their local ally, the Shiite armed movement Hezbollah: The Americans are watching troubled Lebanon.

Lebanon's people, survivors of a 1975-90 civil war and persistent sectarian strife thereafter, are used to rumors of war sweeping the country. Now tensions are rising again among many Lebanese, as well as the regional and international powers that claim a strategic interest in the country's internal affairs.

The sharpest fears here center on the possibility of renewed clashes between Hezbollah and Israel, which fought for 33 days in 2006 after Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid. The war killed more than 1,000 Lebanese, most of them civilians, and more than 150 Israeli soldiers and civilians.

Today, normally sleepy towns in the country's south are abuzz with stories of Hezbollah fighters getting ready for a new war. Some Lebanese are renting second apartments in neighborhoods far from possible areas of conflict. Barbers offer up chatter to their customers about when and where trouble might start.

Saudi Arabia, France and the United States in recent weeks have issued warnings to their citizens in Lebanon or scaled back some embassy operations, citing security. Applications for Lebanese passports have increased 30 percent in recent weeks, according to local media reports.

"I don't know where I would go -- I have nephews in different countries. If the war breaks out, I will go to them," Khadija Hamadeh, a 47-year-old Lebanese woman, said at a passport office in the southern district of Beirut. Hamadeh clutched a paper ticket, waiting for the number on it -- 97 -- to be called for her first-ever passport application.

"I'm tired," she said. "And I really couldn't stand another war."

This week, followers of a senior Hezbollah figure, Imad Mughniyah, who was killed in a bombing in Syria's capital, Damascus, will end the traditional 40 days of mourning.

Hezbollah blamed Israel for Mughniyah's killing and pledged "open war" to avenge him. Israel has placed its armed forces on high alert.

Because of the ambiguous outcome of Israel's 2006 battle with Hezbollah, many regional analysts say Israel's response in any renewed fighting would reach beyond Hezbollah's southern stronghold and hit targets all over Lebanon, and in Syria, which supports the movement.

"This is a very risky time, and people's worries, unfortunately, are justified," said Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

Lebanon has been in internal political crisis since the Feb. 14, 2005, assassination of a former prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri.

The country has been without a president since November, owing to rivalries between the U.S.-allied government and the Syrian-backed opposition, led by Hezbollah.

U.S. officials accuse Syria of prolonging Lebanon's political stalemate in part to try to stave off an international tribunal in Hariri's bombing death. Opposition leaders, in turn, accuse the United States of wanting the deadlock to continue to prevent a less sympathetic figure from becoming president.

In recent weeks, Saudi Arabia and the United States have pushed other governments in the region to isolate Syria as punishment for Lebanon's continuing political crisis. Hariri was a close friend of the Saudi royal family, which granted him Saudi citizenship.

When President Bush toured the Middle East in January, Saudi King Abdullah won U.S. agreement to dispatch the USS Cole and two other ships to the Lebanese coast. Senior Pentagon and State Department officials said the Cole will stay just off the coast, except for brief missions elsewhere, until Lebanon elects a president.

Abdullah, once considered Syria's closest ally among the Saudis, dispatched Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal in February to Washington, Paris, London, Berlin and Moscow to ask for a united stand on Lebanon and continued pressure against Syria, said U.S. and Saudi officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Saudi intelligence chief, meanwhile, went to Beijing and Persian Gulf countries to seek cooperation, the officials said. The United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan and even Russia -- an ally and arms supplier to Syria -- all have informed Syria that the world holds it responsible for ending Lebanon's internal crisis, officials said.

Saudi Arabia has also organized a high-level boycott of a March 29-30 Arab League summit in Damascus. Abdullah and several other Arab kings and presidents are slated to send foreign ministers and other representatives to the summit, rather than attend themselves. Iran, Syria's ally, said this week that it, too, would send only its foreign minister.

Abdullah sent his foreign minister to Syria last month to warn of the summit boycott and urge Syria to avert it by using its influence in Lebanon to ease the crisis there. Syrian officials indicated that they might help, officials said -- but only if the international tribunal was reined in. Its investigators want to question senior Syrian officials in Hariri's killing.

The tribunal tentatively is scheduled to begin proceedings this summer. The United States has increased its financial pledge for the court from $7 million to $14 million.

Syria last week formally invited the Lebanese government to attend the summit, a conciliatory gesture that eased feelings slightly. But many analysts see strong tensions continuing. The polarization is now "extreme," said Ahmed Youssef, director of the Institute for Arab Research and Studies, a Cairo-based center affiliated with the Arab League. "I don't have the impression any of these actors in Lebanon are willing to end action until their interests" in the country are addressed.

On the Corniche, Beirut's famous waterfront road, 69-year-old retiree Samir Eid stared out at the Mediterranean last week. Eid's son was due to leave Lebanon in a few days, following the lead of Eid's three other children, who found it impossible to make a living in Lebanon's conflict-blighted economy. But Eid looked dreamy, and pleased.

"We really have no choice -- what can we do?" Eid asked. "We wait, we live day by day, we try to steal some moments of peace, like now. Today is perfect, but what tomorrow brings could be a living hell."

Wright reported from Washington and Knickmeyer from Cairo. Correspondents Anthony Shadid in southern Lebanon and Faiza Saleh Ambah in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, contributed to this report.

Extrajudicial slayings on rise in Colombia

Soldiers, under pressure to show progress in a U.S.-funded war, allegedly are killing civilians and passing them off as rebels.

By Chris Kraul
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 21, 2008

GRANADA, COLOMBIA — Street vendor Israel Rodriguez went fishing last month and never came back. Two days later, his family found his body buried in a plastic bag, classified by the Colombian army as a guerrilla fighter killed in battle.

Human rights activists say the Feb. 17 death is part of a deadly phenomenon called "false positives" in which the armed forces allegedly kill civilians, usually peasants or unemployed youths, and brand them as leftist guerrillas.

A macabre facet of a general increase in "extrajudicial killings" by the military, "false positives" are a result of intense pressure to show progress in Colombia's U.S.-funded war against leftist insurgents, the activists say.

Rodriguez's sister Adelaida said he had served three years in the army and was neither a guerrilla nor a sympathizer. "He never made any trouble for anyone," she said, adding that she believed the army killed her brother to "gain points."

Such killings have spread terror here in the central state of Meta. Last year the state led Colombia in documented cases of extrajudicial killings, with 287 civilians allegedly slain by the military, according to the Colombian Commission of Jurists, a human rights group. That's a 10% increase from the previous year

Although there appear to be no official -- or unofficial -- tallies of "false positives," human rights activists say they believe such incidents are on the rise, along with the overall increase in killings by the military, based on their discussions with victims' families and analyses of circumstances surrounding individual cases.

"It's quite likely, because the same scenario appears over and over again in the cases I review," said John Lindsay-Poland of the New York-based Fellowship of Reconciliation. "Victims last seen alive in civilian clothing later are found dead dressed in camouflage and claimed as guerrilla casualties."

The killings have increased in recent years amid an emphasis on rebel death tolls as the leading indicator of military success, the human rights groups say. Even Colombian officials acknowledge that soldiers and their commanders have been given cash and promotions for upping their units' body counts.

Since President Alvaro Uribe took office in 2002, the military has scored notable successes in winning back territory from leftist rebel groups and improving security, buoyed by billions of dollars in military aid from the United States under Plan Colombia, the program that fights drug trafficking and terrorism.

But at the same time, the military's human rights record is getting worse, charged a coalition of Colombian and international human rights groups.

And new research by two U.S. peace groups into the killings raises serious questions about whether the United States is doing enough, as required by law, to bar U.S. funding to Colombian military units that have elicited allegations of killings and other human rights violations.

Amnesty International USA and the Fellowship of Reconciliation have found that the U.S. government "vetted" or approved military assistance to at least 11 Colombian armed forces units last year despite "credible allegations regarding killings, disappearances and collaboration with outlawed paramilitary forces," Renata Rendon of Amnesty International USA said in Washington this month.

"It's outrageous this is happening. It's up to the [U.S. government] to ensure that we are not providing aid to abusive units," Rendon said.

While not responding specifically to the claims, an official at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota said this month that Colombian armed forces' killings of civilians were a "serious problem, a serious concern."

"It's something we take very seriously. If you're going to win a war like this, a big part is establishing rule of law and winning the people's confidence in your legitimacy and commitment to legal institutions," said the official, who was not authorized to speak for attribution. He defended the vetting process but said it was complicated by the fact that allegations of human rights abuses often were "not sufficiently specific or verifiable."

To address the issue of impunity, Colombia's attorney general last year set up special investigative teams in Meta and Antioquia states, which had the highest numbers of alleged abuses by the military. In November, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos sent a directive to military commanders ordering major changes, including giving civil courts more jurisdiction in investigating incidents.

But the killings are still spreading terror here in Meta state. Ramiro Orjuela Aguilar, a Bogota human rights attorney representing 20 families of suspected "false positive" victims in Meta, blamed the military's use of paid informants or demobilized guerrillas for many of the killings.

"They have an incentive to name people as rebels because they are paid for information whether it's correct or not," Orjuela said.

Several of the Meta victims last year were youths living in and around Granada, the hub of a cattle and farming region that has been fiercely contested in recent years by leftist guerrillas, the armed forces and right-wing paramilitary troops. It is also home to the army's 12th Mobile Brigade, a unit that Orjuela says is implicated in many of the killings.

Orjuela alleges that the army is engaging in "social cleansing" in Meta, home to four of the five municipalities that made up the so-called neutral zone occupied by Colombian guerrillas from 1998 to 2002. Killings and mass displacements of residents here are efforts to deprive guerrillas of sympathizers, Orjuela said.

"They are trying to deprive the fish of its water," he said.

Kidnapped on an outing to the Ariari River, Rodriguez, the street vendor, may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, relatives theorize, caught by a band of police officers or soldiers who were on a "fishing trip" of their own for victims.

Orjuela said cases involving alleged "false positives" seemed to decline after the Colombian army issued the November directive to all commanders ordering that officers and the rank and file be made aware that the most important standards of success are demobilizations and captures of guerrillas, and then body counts. But he said he had noticed a resurgence lately, noting the Rodriguez killing.

Adelaida Rodriguez said that despite the government's initiatives, she and her family were reluctant to press for an investigation. Referring to her brother, she said, "If we make noise, we'll end up like him."

chris.kraul@latimes.com

Iraq panel clears obstacle to provincial elections

Under U.S. pressure, the presidential council backs measure after resolving dispute.

By Alexandra Zavis
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 20, 2008

BAGHDAD — Iraq's presidential council dropped its objections Wednesday to a law that helps clear the way for provincial elections that are considered key to reconciling the country's ethnic and religious factions.

The unexpected announcement by the council, made up of the country's president and two vice presidents, follows intense lobbying by U.S. officials to make the power-sharing compromises needed to solidify a recent drop in violence.

U.S. patience with Iraq's fractious politicians is wearing thin as the war enters its sixth year. But Wednesday's decision offers American officials here a sign of progress, which they can use to make the case in Washington for time over the summer to assess the impact of U.S. troop withdrawals underway before pulling out more forces. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker will make their recommendations to Congress next month.

The measure, which defines the relationship between the country's 18 provinces and the central government, calls for elections by Oct. 1. Iraq's parliament approved it Feb. 13 under a package deal that included a $48-billion national budget and an amnesty plan for some of the mostly Sunni Arab detainees languishing in custody.

But the presidential council withheld its needed approval because of objections from Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, a member of the main Shiite Muslim political party, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council. President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and Vice President Tariq Hashimi, a Sunni, are the other council members.

The dispute centered on an article that would give the prime minister the authority to ask parliament to remove a provincial governor. Abdul Mahdi argued that the provision was unconstitutional and that the authority to dismiss governors should rest with the provincial councils that select them, an aide said.

Abdul Mahdi's party, a strong proponent of decentralization, won control of most of the overwhelmingly Shiite south in the last provincial elections, in 2005. But the party faces a growing challenge from followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr, who helped put Prime Minister Nouri Maliki in office.

Sadr loyalists had accused Abdul Mahdi and his party of trying to delay the elections to hang on to power.

The council, which must unanimously agree to any legislation before it becomes law, dropped its objections after receiving assurances that parliament would consider amendments to the law, said Nasir Ani, the panel's chief of staff.

The measure now must be published in an official gazette, which is expected in the coming days.

Even with approval of the law, the political blocs need to agree on rules for the election.

Most Sunni Arabs boycotted the last elections, as did Sadr's followers, handing a disproportionate share of local power to other factions representing the majority Shiites and to their Kurdish allies. The imbalance has been a source of mounting friction in ethnically and religiously mixed parts of the country, as well as in the Shiite south, where Sadr's followers are pushing for more influence. U.S. officials have said that fresh elections are essential to stave off more violence.

The number of attacks dropped late last year after the U.S. military deployed 28,500 additional troops to Iraq, Sunni Muslim tribesmen rebelled against religious extremists in their areas, and Sadr ordered his Mahdi Army militia to stand down.

But a string of recent suicide bombings has raised the civilian casualty toll as the added troops are being pulled out. Five combat brigades will be gone by the end of July, bringing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq to about 140,000 from a peak of nearly 170,000.

Petraeus has said that he would like time to assess whether the security gains can withstand further withdrawals.

Underscoring the danger, a woman with explosives hidden under her black gown attacked a police convoy Wednesday, killing five people and injuring 11 northeast of Baghdad, police said. It was the ninth suicide attack carried out by a woman this year.

The latest attack happened in a busy commercial district of Balad Ruz, a religiously mixed city in Diyala province. The woman stepped into the street as a convoy drove by ferrying a police captain to work, according to the provincial operations center. Two policemen were among those killed and four were injured, police said.

The U.S. military, meanwhile, announced the death of a soldier Wednesday in a vehicle rollover in Diyala. At least 3,991 U.S. personnel have died since the American-led invasion in March 2003, according to the independent website icasualties.org.

North of Diyala, U.S. forces accidentally killed three Iraqi policemen and injured a fourth on the road between Kirkuk and Hawija. Iraqi police, responding to a report of a possible car bomb, drove into an area where American troops were conducting operations, said Staff Sgt. Sam Smith, a spokesman for U.S. forces.

"Entering into a previously cordoned area at a high rate of speed, the Iraqi police received fire from a coalition force soldier who had perceived the vehicle as a threat," Smith said in an e-mail. "The incident is currently under investigation."

alexandra.zavis@latimes.com

Special correspondents in Baghdad, Kirkuk and Mosul contributed to this report.

In Blow to Serbia, 3 Neighbors Say They’ll Recognize Kosovo

By REUTERS

BELGRADE, Serbia (Reuters) — Croatia, Hungary and Bulgaria announced Wednesday that they would recognize Kosovo, a blow to Serbia’s efforts to overturn Kosovo’s month-old declaration of independence.

In a joint statement issued in their capitals, the three countries in the region said the decision was based on “thorough consideration.” They also underlined the importance of protecting the Serbian minority in Kosovo, where more than 90 percent of the residents are ethnic Albanians.

“The government has made a decision to recognize Kosovo,” said the Croatian prime minister, Ivo Sanader. “I do understand this is a difficult one for Serbia to swallow. That’s one of the reasons we have waited until now. But I don’t expect a worsening of political and economic relations because there is no alternative to good neighborly relations.”

The Croatia Mission in Belgrade, near the United States Embassy, which was attacked and burned by Serbian protesters last month, was closed for the day behind new steel shutters.

Some Bulgarian families who were worried about security left Serbia, diplomatic officials said.

A Hungarian diplomatic official said there was concern in Budapest about potential attacks on the ethnic Hungarian minority — about 300,000 people — in the northern province of Vojvodina.

But, he said, “independent Kosovo is a reality, and recognition cannot be avoided.”

Serbia’s pro-Western foreign minister, Vuk Jeremic, acknowledged the neighbors’ decision “with sadness.”

“Countries that make this decision cannot have good ties with Serbia,” he said in Greece, a traditional ally that has not recognized Kosovo.

More than 30 countries have now recognized Kosovo. Canada announced its recognition on Tuesday, reiterating the Western case that forcing its two million Albanians to rejoin Serbia after nine years under United Nations rule was not a viable option.

In Washington, President Bush authorized the sale of weapons and other defense matériel to the government of Kosovo, a step that will almost certainly inflame Serbian and Russian officials who oppose Kosovo’s independence. In a formal notice to the secretary of state required under the Foreign Assistance Act, Mr. Bush said the sales, along with defense training and military exchanges, would “strengthen the security of the United States and promote world peace.”

Serbia’s pro-Western president, Boris Tadic, said this week that ties with Croatia would suffer further. Serbs and Croats fought a war from 1991 to 1995 over the breakup of Yugoslavia.

“We want to have the best possible relations with this country,” Mr. Tadic said. “But recognition of Kosovo is certainly not an act of good will between neighbors.”

In the Kosovo Serbian stronghold of Mitrovica, United Nations police officers returned to the base they were forced to abandon Monday in the worst riots yet over Kosovo’s independence.

NATO says the violence was orchestrated by one faction in the Serbian government. The Belgrade daily Blic on Wednesday cited officials as saying that Slobodan Samardzic, who is the minister for Kosovo and among those who advocate a tough stance, had advocated keeping tensions high.

Report: Kenya's Post-Election Violence 'Meticulously' Organized

By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 17, 2008; 6:40 AM

Nairobi, March 17-- Post-election attacks on villagers in Kenya's western Rift Valley were often "meticulously" organized by local opposition leaders who called for "war" against people from President Mwai Kibaki's Kikuyu ethnic group, according to a report by the group Human Rights Watch released Monday.

The report also detailed widespread killings by Kenyan police of opposition supporters, especially in the opposition stronghold of Kisumu in western Kenya. It also found circumstantial evidence to suggest that senior government officials were aware of planned reprisal attacks by Kikuyu gangs against opposition supporters in several other western towns.

A prominent Kenyan diplomat told The Washington Post that it was an "open secret" that certain Kikuyu politicians provided funding for gangs of young Kikuyu men and ferried them to the town of Naivasha, where they helped carry out one of the most brutal revenge attacks in late January.

"This was not done by ordinary citizens, it was arranged by people with money," said one young man who took part in the attacks, according to the report. "They brought the jobless like me. We need something to eat each day."

Violence following Kenya's disputed Dec. 27 presidential elections is estimated to have killed at least 1,000 people and displaced a half million, with most of the violence taking place across the volatile Rift Valley, where longstanding grievances over land fueled much of the violence.

The violence tarred Kenya's image as one of Africa's political success stories, rekindling tribal animosities and controversy over land use and government corruption. After weeks of international negotiation, Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga reached a power sharing agreement meant to defuse the crisis.

U.N. and NATO troops clash with Serbs in Kosovo

By Branislav Krstic

MITROVICA, Kosovo (Reuters) - NATO troops came under fire during Serb riots in the northern Kosovo flashpoint of Mitrovica on Monday, in the worst violence in the territory since the Albanian majority declared independence last month.

The rioting was a challenge to the authority of NATO, the United Nations and European Union, underscoring fears that Kosovo could be heading for partition one month after breaking away from Serbia.

Reuters witnesses in the town reported hearing gunfire as hundreds of Serbs clashed with NATO peacekeepers and U.N. police. A French NATO spokesman said automatic weapons fire had been aimed at peacekeepers but gave no further details.

United Nations police were ordered to pull out after hundreds of Serbs opposed to Kosovo's independence fought back against a dawn raid to evict them from a court building they occupied last week.

Police and troops fired tear gas at protesters throwing stones and firecrackers. Cars were set ablaze and several police and NATO troops were hurt in an explosion.

"Eight French KFOR soldiers are injured with grenades, stones and molotov cocktails," said French spokesman Etienne du Fayet de la Tour. Their wounds were not life-threatening, he said.

KFOR is the U.N.-mandated NATO peacekeeping force in Kosovo, where about 120,000 Serbs remain and form a bitter minority among two million ethnic Albanians.

The raid to retake the court coincided with the March 17 anniversary of Kosovo Albanian riots against Serbs in 2004, in which 19 people were killed and hundreds of homes and churches burned in two days of chaos that caught NATO flat-footed.

It was this flare-up that pushed the West to start talks on a final status solution for Kosovo after years in limbo as an international protectorate following the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

GRIM ANNIVERSARY

"An order has been given for UNMIK police to withdraw from the north (of Kosovo) because of ongoing violent riots," a spokesman said in Kosovo's capital, Pristina.

"More than 100 people have been treated for the effects of tear gas," Mitrovica hospital director Milan Ivanovic said.

The violence started after several hundred U.N. special police backed by NATO peacekeepers stormed a U.N. court and arrested dozens of Serbs who had seized the building on Friday.

Rioters attacked three U.N. vehicles, breaking doors and freeing around 10 detainees from the raid, witnesses said.

Some U.N. vans with detainees were still in the courtyard of the compound, in a standoff with dozens of Serb protesters outside blocking their exit.

The takeover of the court on Friday was the latest effort by Serbs to assert control over policing and justice in north Kosovo following the ethnic Albanian majority's declaration of independence on Feb 17.

More than 50 court protesters were arrested and taken to prison in Pristina, a KFOR spokesman said.

"KFOR is securing the areas in the north where Kosovo Albanians live," the spokesman said, referring to a handful of Albanian communities in the Serb-dominated north.

The Kosovo Serbs, almost half of whom live in the north, reject Kosovo's Western-backed declaration of independence.

Supported by Russia, Belgrade has vowed to never accept the secession and to extend its authority over Serb areas, particularly the north.

Serbia lost control of its southern province in 1999, when NATO intervened to halt the ethnic cleansing of civilians in a counter-insurgency war, and the United Nations took over.

Kosovo's secession was backed by the United States and the European Union, which is deploying a supervisory mission to take over some of the U.N.'s tasks. Some analysts fear Serbia is now trying to partition the territory.

(Additional reporting by Fatos Bytyci, Shaban Buza; writing by Matt Robinson and Douglas Hamilton; editing by Timothy Heritage)

Five Years

By JOHN F. BURNS

LONDON

FIVE years on, it seems positively surreal.

On the evening of March 19, 2003, a small group of Western journalists had grandstand seats for the big event in Baghdad, the start of the full-scale American bombing of strategic targets in the Iraqi capital. We had forced a way through a bolted door at the top of an emergency staircase leading to the 21st-story roof of the Palestine Hotel, with a panoramic view of Saddam Hussein’s command complex across the Tigris River.

The bombing had been jump-started 16 hours earlier, when President Bush ordered two B-1 bombers to attack the Dora Farms complex in south-central Baghdad in a dawn raid intended to kill Mr. Hussein and end the war before it began. That caught everyone by surprise, including Saddam, who somehow survived. But by nightfall, the city was braced. The BBC reported B-52 bombers were taking off from a base in England in early afternoon, and we knew, from the flying time, that zero hour for Baghdad would be about 9 p.m.

At precisely that moment — not a few seconds early, nor late — the first cruise missile struck the vast, bunker-like presidential command complex in what would become, under the American occupation, the Green Zone. For 40 minutes, followed by a break, and then another 40 minutes, a fusillade of missiles and bombs struck palaces, military complexes, intelligence buildings, the heart of Saddam Hussein’s years of murderous tyranny. In Washington, they called it “shock and awe.” In Baghdad, Iraqis yearning for their liberation from Saddam called it, simply, “the air show.”

On that hotel roof were experienced Western foreign correspondents, men and women for whom impartiality was their coda. We feared the bombing would remove the last reason for the secret police to spare us, since our Iraqi “fixers” had warned us that the only thing protecting us in those final days was the regime’s concern that harming Western reporters would speed the course to war. Demonstrating our impartiality, once the first missiles struck, thus assumed an intensely personal, as well as professional, dimension — the measure, perhaps, of whether we would survive the time it took for Saddam’s regime to finally collapse.

But from that first impact, among many on the roof, the mood was scarcely one of cool detachment, or at least not as cautioned as it might have been by the longer-term implications of what we were seeing. Part of it, no doubt, was the air show — the sheer, astonishing, overwhelming demonstration of power, more like an act of God than man, unleashing in those watching from the roof something approaching awe. But the larger part, the one that seems surreal now in the light of all that has followed, was the sense that, with the beginning of the end of Saddam Hussein’s evil, the suffering of millions of ordinary Iraqis that we had chronicled, and pitied, was ending.

As they must have to many Americans watching the live television coverage, those missiles and bombs seemed, in the headiness of that moment, to be fit retribution for a ruthless dictator, and the medieval wretchedness he had visited on Iraq’s people. That it took such force to accomplish seemed mitigated, at least somewhat, by the precision of the strikes, with only isolated instances, during the 19 days before American troops reached Baghdad, of errant missiles killing innocent civilians. Early one morning, I went to the smoking wreckage of the city’s central telephone exchange, only to find patients from Iraq’s main heart hospital, 150 feet away, across a narrow lane, uninjured, out in the garden in their pajamas watching the commotion.

It was not long, of course, before events in Iraq began giving everybody cause to reconsider. On April 9, the day the Marines entered Baghdad and used one of their tanks to help the crowd haul down Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square, American troops stood by while mobs began looting, ravaging palaces and torture centers, along with ministries, museums and hospitals. Late in the day, at the oil ministry, I discovered it was the only building marines had orders to protect. Turning to Jon Lee Anderson, a correspondent for The New Yorker who had been my companion that day, I saw shock mirrored in his face. “Say it ain’t so,” I said. But it was.

Looking back, it has been fashionable to say the Americans began losing the war right then. At the least, it was the first misstep in what quickly became a long chronicle: the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the primary cause the Bush Administration had given for the war; the absence of a plan, at least any the Pentagon intended to implement, for the period after Baghdad fell; the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, and thus casting aside the help it might have given in fighting the insurgency that began flickering within 10 days of American troops entering Baghdad; the lack of an effective American counterinsurgency strategy, at least until the troop increase last year finally began bringing the war’s toll down.

Beyond these, there were the instances when America’s intentions were betrayed by its troops in more personal ways, with the abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib, with the shooting deaths of 24 civilians in Haditha and with the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl at Mahmudiya, along with the killing of three other members of her family, all leading to court-martial hearings that tore at the heart of anyone who starts from a position of admiration for the American armed forces. The Marine offensive that recaptured Falluja from Islamic militants in November 2004, virtually flattening the city without achieving more than a temporary change in the arc of the war, may also draw its share of condemnation.

At the fifth anniversary, the conflict’s staggering burden is a rebuke to any who hoped Mr. Hussein’s removal might be accomplished at acceptable cost. Back in 2003, only the most prescient could have guessed that the current “surge” would raise the American troop commitment above 160,000, the highest level since the invasion, in the war’s fifth year, or that the toll would include tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, as well nearly 4,000 American troops; or that America’s financial costs, by some recent estimates, would rise above $650 billion by 2008, on their way to perhaps $2 trillion if the commitment continues for another five years. Beyond that, there are a million or more Iraqis living as refugees in neighboring Arab countries, and the pitiful toll of fear and deprivation on Iraqi streets.

Those of us who witnessed the war at first hand have more personal reckonings. These pressed home, for me, on countless occasions during the years since the invasion, up to my departure from Baghdad late last summer, when I completed a five-year assignment in Iraq and moved to a new posting in London. Worst of all were the moments when war and its arguments were reduced from the remote, and political, to the intensely personal, and to that terrible sense, familiar to anybody who has experienced war, that nothing, or almost nothing, can justify its wounds.

They are scenes that do not fade: Watching American soldiers being slipped into body bags for the journey home, and knowing, at that instant, that the lives of unknowing families thousands of miles away have been shattered; surveying the aftermath of suicide bombings, with severed limbs in the street, and hearing the wailing of the Iraqi bereaved. Or, an experience we endured twice at The New York Times, having a young Iraqi man working on our news staff gunned down by militiamen and insurgents, leaving children, some barely old enough to be in school, to cope with life without a beloved father and a brother, and to have no sense of why.

In time, those who launched the war will answer in history, as much as they will claim the credit if America ultimately finds a way home with honor, and without destroying all it went to Iraq to achieve. But reporters, too, may wish to make an accounting. If we accurately depicted the horrors of Saddam’s Iraq in the run-up to the war, with its charnel houses and mass graves, we have to acknowledge that we were less effective, then, in probing beneath the carapace of terror to uncover other facets of Iraq’s culture and history that would have a determining impact on the American project to build a Western-style democracy, or at least the basics of a civil society.

It was not easy, with a reporter’s every move scrutinized by Saddam Hussein’s lugubrious minders, to undertake that kind of in-depth reporting. But from the exhaustive reporting in the years since, Americans now know how deeply traumatized Iraqis were by the brutality of Saddam, and how deep was the poison of fear and distrust. They also know, in detail, through the protracted trials of Mr. Hussein and his senior henchmen, of the inner workings of the merciless machinery that transported victims to the torture chambers and mass graves.

They know, too, through coverage in this newspaper and others, of the deep fissures, of ethnicity, sect and tribe, that were camouflaged by the quarter-century of Mr. Hussein’s totalitarian rule. As much as America’s policy failures, it has been these factors that have contributed to the Iraqi quagmire. Properly weighed, in time, they might have given cause for second thoughts about the wisdom of the invasion. What seems certain is that those entrusted with the task of fulfilling the American mission were confronted, from the beginning, by an odds-against calculus. Iraq, in 2003, could scarcely have been less prepared than it was to embrace democracy, dependent as that is, everywhere, on a minimum of popular consent and trust.

The harsh reality is that many Iraqis, at least by the time of the two elections held in 2005, had little zest for democracy, at least as Westerners understand it. This, too, was not fully understood at the time. To walk Baghdad’s streets on the voting days, especially during the December election that produced the Shiite-led government now in power, was inspiriting. With 12 million people casting ballots, a turnout of about 75 per cent, it was natural enough for President Bush to say Iraqis had embraced the American vision. In truth, what the majority produced was less a vote for democracy than a vote for a once-and-for-all, permanent transfer of power, from the Sunni minority that ruled in Iraq for centuries, to an impatient, and deeply wounded, if not outright vengeful, Shiite majority.

What has followed has been predictable. For close to two years, the Shiite religious parties that won the December 2005 election have clung tenaciously to their new-found power, and the Sunni parties, mostly unreconciled to an Iraq ruled by Shiites, have maneuvered in ways intended to keep open the possibility, ultimately, of a Sunni restoration. Nothing, in short, has been settled. Americans officials bridle at the failure to tackle decisively any of the issues they identified as crucial to “reconciliation,” including the critical issue of the future share of oil revenues. Meanwhile, the rival Iraqi blocs, taking the long view, look beyond the American occupation to a time when these central issues of power will be settled among themselves.

American hopes are that Iraqis, with enough American troops still present to stiffen the new Iraqi forces and prevent a slide backward toward all-out civil war, will ultimately tire of the violence in the way of other peoples who have been plunged into communal violence, as many Lebanese did during their 15-year civil war. Those hopes have been buoyed by a reduction in violence in the last year that can been traced to the American troop increase and to the cooperation or quiescence of some previously militant groups, both Sunni and Shiite.

They are hopes shared by many ordinary Iraqis. Opinion polls, including those commissioned by the American command, have long suggested that a majority of Iraqis would like American troops withdrawn, but another lesson to be drawn from Saddam Hussein’s years is that any attempt to measure opinion in Iraq is fatally skewed by intimidation. More often than not, people tell pollsters and reporters what they think is safe, not necessarily what they believe. My own experience, invariably, was that Iraqis I met who felt secure enough to speak with candor had an overwhelming desire to see American troops remain long enough to restore stability.

That sentiment is not one that many critics of the war in the United States seem willing to accept, but neither does it offer the glimmer of cheer that it might seem to offer to many supporters of the war. For it would be passing strange, after the years of unrelenting bloodshed, if Iraqis demanded anything else. It is small credit to the invasion, after all it has cost, that Iraqis should arrive at a point when all they want from America is a return to something, stability, that they had under Saddam. For America, too, it is a deeply dispiriting prospect, promising no early end to the bleeding in Iraq.

For one Iraqi general, a tale of lost hope and honor

'I thought I was setting Iraq on the right path,' says Jawad Rumi Daini, a retired soldier who joined the new force after the U.S.-led invasion, hoping to use his experience. But tragedy and controversy followed.

By Ned Parker
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 16, 2008

CAIRO — Late at night, when he can't sleep, the Iraqi general paces past the dimly lighted model homes and construction sites of his Cairo neighborhood. He avoids the main streets, crammed with shopping malls and restaurants. He doesn't want to run into other Iraqis. He has enemies.

He slips back in after 1 a.m., careful not to disturb his wife, children and grandchildren. But still he can't drift off. It will be close to dawn when finally he shuts his eyes, after exhausting himself thinking about how he will protect his family, how long his money will last. How he fell so far and ended up banished by the Iraqi government and forgotten by the Americans.

The fate of Maj. Gen. Jawad Rumi Daini is more than the story of one man's disgrace. As the fifth anniversary of the invasion to oust Saddam Hussein nears, he serves as a singular witness to the hopes and horrors of the last five years: a man haunted by his role in a terrible stampede on a Baghdad bridge that left nearly 1,000 people dead; a man targeted for his involvement in the discovery of a Shiite police torture chamber; a man devastated by the killing of his son.

Some call Daini an honorable officer who sacrificed for his country. Others brand him a coward who accommodated Shiite militias and Sunni fighters alike.

In today's Iraq, where nothing is black and white and motives are inscrutable, the answer may be somewhere in between. Even with fresh talk of reconciliation in his homeland, the 59-year-old has no hopes of returning: He saw too much as the country slid into civil war.

"I joined the old army and the new," he said, "and lost both."

The beginning

Daini watched the U.S. tanks and soldiers stream into Baghdad in April 2003. As an army veteran, he had been ordered by Hussein's Baath Party to help lead his neighbors in resisting the Americans, but as soon as he saw their tremendous firepower, Daini recognized it as a lost cause.

He had fought in the 1980-88 war with Iran, and his reputation as a commander was sterling. But he was forced into retirement in July 1990, a month before Hussein's ill-fated Kuwait invasion, after it was discovered that his brother had joined the Badr Brigade, an armed Shiite group then based in Iran that was dedicated to the overthrow of the Sunni-dominated regime in Baghdad.

"Daini was a big name," recalled a Shiite politician who knew him in the Hussein years. Like others, he agreed to speak about Daini only on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the events in which Daini was involved. "He was a person who was independent, who did not follow a party or political direction."

Retired, Daini dabbled in real estate and ran a farm south of Baghdad. But he was a soldier. The army was in his blood. "How can you be at home when the nation needs a man to protect it?" he said.

After the fall of Hussein, everyone was watching him -- insurgents and Iraqi officials. He was among the elite of the old Iraqi military, and he couldn't stay neutral. People knew he would have to either join the nation's new order or his old army comrades in the insurgency. The alternative was to risk being killed -- whether by gunmen affiliated with Shiite political parties or the so-called resistance. Within months, some Iraqi politicians had approached him and asked whether he would serve in the new U.S.-backed army.

"I thought it was appropriate for me to go back," Daini said.

He reported for duty in January 2004. On the job, he and other officers started to counsel the Americans on how they should change their behavior. Civilians complained that U.S. soldiers pushed women and the elderly and locked up the wrong people on false tips. Daini recommended measures for searching houses and avoiding confrontation.

"I thought I was setting Iraq on the right path."

His move was viewed as betrayal by former commanders who had joined the insurgency. Asked about Daini, one former general snapped, "Don't talk to me about Jawad Rumi. Nobody does what he did."

In October 2004, Daini established the 2nd Brigade of the 6th Division in east Baghdad, a territory encompassing the Sunni enclave of Adhamiya, which harbored Sunni insurgents, and Sadr City, the teeming slum where Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi Army militia held sway.

Daini prayed at both Sunni mosques and Shiite mosques to show that he represented all Iraqis. He perched children on his lap and read them stories. No one knew whether he was Shiite or Sunni. He consciously kept people in the dark about his sect.

"His biggest strength was he was a patriot," a senior U.S. officer who worked closely with Daini told The Times. "He held himself above any ethnocentric focus. He was in it for Iraq to be a stable nation."

In those early months, his men faced car bombings, suicide attacks and ambushes. Daini survived at least five assassination attempts. Despite his age, his slight paunch and double chin, he still could move quickly, and if shot at, he'd grab his rifle. After one ambush on his convoy, he charged down the street with his bodyguards, sprayed gunfire at the assailants and burned their house to the ground.

Like other officers in the new army, he quickly learned the limits of his power. Arresting Sunni or Shiite militants prompted complaints from the sects' respective political leaders.

"When he captured some people from the Mahdi [Army], or some criminals or outlaws, some parties and people in Sadr City didn't like him. It was the same thing in [Sunni] Adhamiya," the Shiite politician lamented. "At that time, we said, 'The one who works in these areas will be sacrificed.' "

The bridge

The songs rang out under a clear blue sky and searing heat for Imam Musa al Kadhim, a Shiite saint believed to have been poisoned in 799 by the caliph, a Sunni. At least 2 million Shiite pilgrims paraded through Baghdad on the anniversary of his death that August day in 2005.

They streamed into Adhamiya, an enclave of support for the insurgency; the green flags of Islam and the black flags of mourning fluttered in the streets. From there they crossed the steel-spanned Two Imams bridge over the Tigris to the saint's tomb in west Baghdad -- in the imposing Imam Kadhim mosque complex with its twin gilded domes and towering minarets.

Daini stood on the Adhamiya side of the bridge, where he was in charge. He had prepared for 20 days with the Americans and his counterpart in Kadhimiya, Gen. Abdul Jalil Khalaf. With sectarian tensions at a boil and fearing a massive attack on Shiite pilgrims, they had searched the roads for bombs and snipers. The bridge had been sealed off with concrete barriers months before.

In the final hours before the pilgrimage, orders came down from the Defense Ministry: Open the bridge.

According to interviews with Iraqi and Western officials in the last year, the U.S. command in Baghdad had wanted to keep the bridge closed for the holiday, but a senior member of a Shiite party in the government called the defense minister and insisted that the barriers be removed. The Iraqi officers had no choice but to follow orders.

Daini removed the concrete blocks on his side of the bridge, but Khalaf cleared only a small pathway.

Shortly after 11 a.m., several mortar shells fell on the west side of the river, and shots were fired. The crowd panicked.

There was shouting about a suicide bomber, and the masses pushed and shoved on the bridge. With one side partially closed, some were crushed underfoot in the stampede and others dived into the river.

By the time it was over, nearly 1,000 people had been trampled or drowned, the worst death toll in a single event since the invasion in 2003.

Immediately after the disaster, Shiite clerics alleged that the army had been infiltrated by Sunni terrorists. Daini and Khalaf were called in for the first of several government inquiries.

At first, both he and Khalaf were cleared of blame. But the two men's accounts conflicted. Daini insisted that he had informed Khalaf of orders to open the bridge, but Khalaf denied this. Both men had American commanders backing their version of events.

"Jawad was a kind of bumbling, unwitting stooge," said another senior U.S. officer, "a small player in a greater plot which he did not understand."

The Jadriya bunker

Violence continued as the December 2005 national elections approached. Sunni militants carried out a campaign of suicide bombings and Shiite militias abducted Sunni men, with many of their bodies dumped beside a sewage plant in east Baghdad.

Sunnis in Adhamiya held a protest, demanding to know the whereabouts of their relatives who had disappeared or been jailed by the national police, an elite force that included Shiite militiamen.

A tip from Daini about a missing 15-year-old boy helped track the teenager to a police bunker in the middle-class district of Jadriya. U.S. officers in Baghdad decided to raid the center and, knowing the move could strain U.S. relations with the Shiite elite, asked Daini to come along.

When they arrived, the building supervisor insisted that there were few detainees there. The Americans ignored him and broke down a locked door. It led into a cramped, dark hallway holding more than 160 detainees.

The troops gave IV fluids to the emaciated detainees, some bruised and some covered with blood.

They couldn't find the boy they were looking for, but Daini recognized a teenager from his neighborhood who had been stopped by police at a checkpoint, clubbed with a rifle and taken away. His family had assumed he was dead and had held a funeral for him.

Afterward, Daini was criticized within the Iraqi army for not tipping them off about the raid.

"He was getting a lot of pressure from Ministry of Defense officials to lay low," said the U.S. commander who supported Daini. "He stuck his neck on the line."

After Samarra

After insurgents blew up the gold-domed Shiite shrine in Samarra in February 2006, Shiite militias roamed Baghdad. The capital was in the throes of sectarian war and Daini tried to help reassert control. He negotiated with the militias to release hostages and to abandon Sunni mosques, he said, but still fell afoul of them.

In June, Daini's soldiers arrested four Mahdi Army members with a blood-coated knife and a list of 30 names, 20 of them crossed out. Daini said he soon got phone calls from the office of newly sworn-in Shiite Prime Minister Nouri Maliki asking for the men to be freed. Daini refused.

The prime minister's office has denied interfering with Daini's operations. However, U.S. military officers have confirmed that Maliki's office often phoned army commanders with demands regarding arrests and operations.

Late on the night of July 2, Daini was inspecting checkpoints when he got a message on the radio: Come back to the base. A letter from the Cabinet had arrived releasing him from the army.

He headed home and slept. The next morning, he went to the base he had helped establish and collected his things.

U.S. commanders say Daini was fired over the Kadhimiya bridge disaster and the Jadriya bunker, calling the raid "a black eye" for the government. A senior Iraqi security official told The Times that the Defense Ministry had to make someone the fall guy for the stampede -- Khalaf had been more shrewd in cultivating people in power, so Daini was sacrificed.

Daini spoke on the phone and met with interpreters for U.S. Maj. Gen. J.D. Thurman, who commanded the Army in Baghdad, and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., head of U.S. forces. Their conversations always ended with apologies -- there was nothing they could do. The Iraqi government had the right to choose its commanders.

Some Iraqis and Americans had soured on him over allegations that he had contacts with armed Sunni and Shiite groups; others believed he was trying to broker deals to end violence in his areas. Regardless, U.S. commanders decided Daini wasn't worth trying to save.

"Jawad tried to do the best he could, but he was scared to death of those factions out there that threatened him or his family," said the U.S. commander who had been critical of Daini.

Then, on Nov. 23, there was a massive car bombing in Sadr City. Nearly 150 people were killed. Daini watched on TV as Hakim Zamili, the deputy health minster and a Sadr supporter, branded Daini a terrorist, accusing him of countenancing past attacks in east Baghdad. Daini turned to his 28-year-old son, Haidar, and said, "It is time to leave."

Within days, Daini's enemies struck. Armed men kidnapped Haidar one morning as he was on his way to work. By 10 p.m., his body had been found in a neighborhood controlled by the Mahdi Army. Daini believed the militia had killed his son.

Daini sent his wife and two daughters to Egypt. He stayed on, convinced that he could sell off their belongings, but no one would buy his home in west Baghdad or the family farm south of the capital. He sold his wife's jewelry -- more than a pound of gold necklaces and bracelets.

He switched houses for safety almost daily as he continued to nurture a hope of selling his property. Finally, his wife phoned from Cairo and demanded that he leave. He couldn't risk failing his wife and children, so he fled his homeland.

"My heart was hemorrhaging," he said.

Egypt

On television, Daini watches Iraqi channels, where he spots his old colleagues. Sometimes Khalaf, the other general involved in the Kadhimiya stampede, appears. He has been appointed police chief in Basra. Daini wonders why Khalaf survived and he did not.

He believes that Khalaf, a close friend of Iraq's current defense minister, had ties to militias and set him up to take the fall.

The month Daini's son was killed, arrest warrants were issued against Khalaf and four of his officers accusing them of murder, extortion and complicity with militias. Within a week, the charges had been dropped and the case's lead witness, an Iraqi lieutenant colonel, killed. Khalaf insists that the charges were trumped up.

Daini sounds bitter, and bereft, as he ponders his fate. The Defense Ministry cut his pension last fall and he worries that he will be arrested or killed if he returns home.

"Many Iraqi officers are all living happily. I am the only one who has suffered such tragedies: the death of my son, the destruction of my whole life," he said.

"I never hurt anybody."

ned.parker@latimes.com